Three Big Lies From Donald Trump’s Border Security Address, Explained

On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump gave his first Oval Office address titled the “Address to the Nation on the Humanitarian and National Security Crisis on our Southern Border.” What followed, however, was much of the racist and xenophobic rhetoric we’ve heard from Trump for the past three and a half years—including the false claims that undocumented immigrants as a whole are dangerous to the United States and that the only solution to questions over our border security is a $5 billion wall. Even worse, Trump’s address showcased that there’s likely no end in sight to the government shutdown that’s heading into its third week.

To recap, in late December Donald Trump said he would refuse to sign any spending bill from Congress that didn’t include over $5 billion to put towards building a wall at the southern U.S. border, effectively shutting down the U.S. government for the time being. (It’s also of note that there are already many areas with fortifications at the U.S.-Mexico border.)

What did Trump have to say about the wall? Well, Americans heard quite a few of the same lies that Trump has used for years:

“Over the years, thousands of Americans have been brutally killed by those who illegally entered our country and thousands more lives will be lost if we don’t act right now.”

As he’s done since the beginning of his presidential campaign, Trump cherry-picked uncited statistics and cases to illustrate his unproven belief that undocumented immigrants are synonymous with crime.

However, this notion that the U.S. is only crime-ridden because of undocumented immigrants is false. In fact, data from the Cato Institute looking at Texas, one of the states most affected by immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, found that native-born Americans are convicted of more crimes than undocumented immigrants and documented immigrants. In fact, undocumented immigrants had 50% fewer criminal convictions than native-born Americans. Moreover, recent academic scholarship highlights that states with more undocumented immigrants decisively have less violent crime.

“Democrats in Congress have refused to acknowledge the crisis…”

During the Democratic rebuttal delivered following Trump’s speech, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer pointed out that much of the “crisis” at the southern border has been manufactured by Trump’s administration—and Democrats have largely been the ones scrambling to stop the disaster.

That said, both parties are in agreement on one thing: The government shutdown should end while discussions and debate over what to do about border security continue. Donald Trump is the only person who doesn’t agree with that notion.

Moreover, the majority of Americans themselves aren’t buying Trump’s claim that the Democrats shoulder the blame for the current shutdown. An aggregation of recent polling on the issue found that 50% of Americans directly blame Trump for the shutdown, compared to just 35% who directly blame the Democrats.

The bottom line? There wasn’t any new information in Trump’s first Oval Office address; it was the same old racism and the same old xenophobia. And unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of livelihoods and millions of Americans will be affected for the time being. In a country where 80 percent of people are living paycheck to paycheck, every day could spell catastrophe.